Laura Pausini

In February 1993, a girl from Solarolo in a dark jacket, eighteen years old, won the youth section at the Sanremo Festival with a song about a high school love that rode away on a train. That melody of La solitudine didn't invent anything new, but behind it was a voice with pinpoint pitch control that few studio singers managed in a first take. The Italian audience fell silent before a vocal power reminiscent of the great melodic voices of the 1970s.

She arrived in Spain twelve months later. The staff at her record label in Madrid were stunned by an unexpected sales phenomenon when the self-titled Spanish-language album sold more than a million copies in physical stores. That figure shattered the records for foreign pop in the Iberian market.

Nobody saw such a commercial impact coming.

But Pausini's sound did not limit itself to repeating the formula of the Italian sentimental ballad. In the late nineties she took the reins of production on albums such as La mia risposta and Tra te e il mare, toughening up the drums, adding orchestral arrangements by Phil Collins and cutting back on the sugar in her lyrics.

The Assault on Celluloid and the Night at the Dolby Theatre

In 2020, director Edoardo Ponti was looking for a voice to close the film adaptation of Romain Gary's novel, La vita davanti a sé, starring Sophia Loren. Songwriter Diane Warren wrote the English demo, and Pausini rewrote the Italian lyrics together with Niccolò Agliardi to build Io sì (Seen). Over three days of lockdown they recorded five different language versions with a restrained arrangement that avoided the excesses of tearjerker melodrama.

In April 2021, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated the song for Best Original Song. It lost the golden statuette to H.E.R.'s soul track, but the Italian singer performed her piece on the rooftop of the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, dressed in red satin and without pre-recorded backing vocals. That performance brought the Italian language back to the global film gala after decades of absence in the music category.

And the gamble paid off.

So the American entertainment industry began to look at her with fresh eyes. She was no longer just the European singer who filled sports arenas in Rome or Mexico City, but a figure capable of holding her own with the narrative structure of an auteur film.

The Prime screen and the parallel realities game

In 2022, director Ivan Cotroneo directed Laura Pausini: Un placer conocerte for Prime Video. The feature film avoided conventional hagiography in favor of a speculative fiction exercise: what kind of life the protagonist would have had if she had not won that TV contest in 1993. Pausini played an alternate version of herself who ran a ceramics shop in Faenza and sang at weekend weddings.

Because cinema allows you to settle old scores with the past.

That visual experiment coincided with preparations for her next musical cycle, Almas Paralelas, released in 2023. To present the repertoire, she completed a marathon of three concerts in twenty-four hours across New York, Madrid and Milan, finishing the challenge without relying on digital pitch correction.

The settlement sheets for her 2024 world tour record 450,000 tickets sold across forty cities, with a technical setup that mobilized eighteen articulated dump trucks and one hundred and forty permanent stage crew members.